The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore Canceled After Two Seasons

Over the last few years, a new wave of comedians and TV shows have climbed into the late-night game: Larry Wilmore, Trevor Noah, Samantha Bee, James Corden, even Stephen Colbert as himself. Now, as Variety reports, Wilmore’s The Nightly Show will be the first of them to bite the dust.

The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore has been on Comedy Central for two seasons: it replaced The Colbert Report when Colbert moved to CBS to take over The Late Show. (Wilmore had long been a strong presence on The Daily Show with John Stewart.) Wilmore’s last episode will air Thursday. Comedy Central president Kent Alterman told Variety that the show was canceled because of low ratings with young adults and its tepid reception on social media. Chris Hardwick’s@Midnight will soon take over the time slot.

Throughout his tenure, Wilmore has served as a singular voice in the still very white late-night space. At the very least, his show will be missed for the way it tackled the increasingly visible issues that black Americans face every day—like police violence—with blistering wit. The news is particularly surprising because it comes just months before a highly anticipated presidential election, with no new program planned to take its place in the political realm. That will leave only Noah’s Daily Show, which still seems to be, as Slate’s Willa Paskin put it back in January, “wanly simulating” the kind of deep, occasionally scathing analysis that was once the show's calling card.

The cancellation also comes just a few months after Wilmore’s appearance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

“I’m really grateful to Comedy Central, Jon Stewart, and our fans to have had this opportunity,” Wilmore said in a statement given to Variety. “But I’m also saddened and surprised we won’t be covering this crazy election or ‘The Unblackening’ as we’ve coined it. And keeping it 100, I guess I hadn’t counted on ‘The Unblackening’ happening to my time slot as well.”